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I also believe brain scan studies (MRI I think) showed male and female brains working differently when confronted with different kinds of problems, like math. Researches were looking at diagnosing something else completely but found by accident that they could differentiate between male and female based upon their brain scans.

It has also seemed in some ways like math might be easier for guys (not necessarily better at it) because males tend think more in terms of objects than females do – they like toys and gadgets, they watch porn and objectify women, etc

Well, if you RTFA, you would have saw the context of the WSJ article was the hobbits that were heroes and won the war...Really kid, READ TFA. Just once, it won't bite...it was not some great anthropological study of hobbits...it was a sarcastic remark about the Tea Party appearing to be stuck in a fantasy world...

According to the WSJ, their view in this instance seems to be that if they shut-down government and cause the US to go into default, that somehow everyone in the country will place all of the blame upon Obama while seeing the Tea Party as heroes, and that this miracle of somehow the general public placing all the blame on Obama will be outweigh the damages in the long run caused by the default and lowering of the US's ratings because the Tea Party would then have free reign to enact all the financial policies of their wet dreams and the Democrats would have no power to stop them (even if they do control the White House and the Senate...because the Tea Party would be heroes to most of the population...).

I think claim is that while the Tea Party see themselves as hobbits, the reality of modern politics and finance does not lend itself to fairy tale endings no matter how much the "hobbits" believe their righteous cause and unwillingness to compromise will prove themselves reluctant heroes. The Wall Street Journal was in fact claiming that they were clueless to reality and will greatly harm the Tea Party and Republican cause.

It was a sarcastic remark - he was quoting the Wall Street Journal who was saying that the Tea Party rather simplistically see themselves as being heroic good little hobbits out to vanquish the obviously evil Mordor without regard to reality. Basically, the Wall Street Journal was saying the Tea Party worldview was rather fucked up, and McCain was emphasizing this.

Bachelor level science degrees often don't lead to high paying jobs. One reason more don't become teachers is that standing in front of a room of bored kids just doesn't sound that appealing. I have worked with science majors for over twenty years, and the reason they don't become teachers has nothing to do with pay.

(When people talk about "high paying" math and science, they usually mean engineering.)

I wondered what ever happened to the idea floating around about wiring all the meters. I guess this zigbee thing took over.

(Years and years ago there was the idea that the power company could save money in the long run on human meter-readers by running a wire to every meter for smart metering, and there was talk that that they could run a broadband wire for about the same cost as any other wire. The argument was that not only would they save money in the long run, they would also be able to generate extra income by selling broadband service to any home they wired.)

Well to be fair, Universal did try to run a couple of episodes of BSG on NBC and see if it could gain traction off of cable. Even if they have no clue how to do it, they did try to give it a shot. It definitely could have been promoted better before the attempt though.

SyFy seems to just keep going down hill though. There used to be several series I would watch. I had alot of doubts about Caprica, but it turned out to be decent. I'm still hanging on to the new Stargate series mainly because there is so little sci-fi left to watch.

It would be a great accomplishment to go to Mars, but that is all it would be - just a feather in our cap. The talk of colonizing is just spin to gloss over the fact that the when we to the Moon just for the accomplishment of it, that the space program kind of went into the toilet afterward.

A serious space program, if it were truly interested in colonization, would focus on the moon. The moon comes first if space colonization is really a goal. The moon comes first for mining and commerce.

There is no reason to skip to Mars except that it would be a bigger accomplishment, but everybody gets bored once you achieve a great accomplishment and the funding disappears.

I mostly agree. Going to Mars to plant a flag would be the end of the space program for another generation. It would be like Apollo all over again - a few visits then everybody gets bored and most of the funding disappears. All the infrastructure for sustained operations needs to be in place and ready to go first.